Radha Chakravarty

Radha Chakravarty has co-edited The Essential Tagore which was nominated Book of the Year (2011) by Martha Nussbaum. Her translations of Tagore include Gora, Boyhood Days, Chokher Bali, Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita, and The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Plays for Children. Other works in translation are Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, In the Name of the Mother by Mahasweta Devi, and Crossings: Stories from Bangladesh and India. She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers, the Modern Novel. She has also edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women, and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices.

Chokher Bali (Binodini) explores the forbidden emotions unleashed when a beautiful young widow enters the seemingly harmonious world of a newly married couple. This path-breaking novel by Rabindranath Tagore weaves a tangled web of relationships between the pampered and self-centred Mahendra, his innocent, childlike bride Asha, their staunch friend Bihari and the wily, seductive Binodini, whose arrival transforms the lives of all concerned. Radha Chakravarty’s translation brings the world of Tagore’s fiction to life, in lucid, idiomatic prose.